Transport (typeface)

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Category	Sans-serif
Date created	1963
Designer(s)	Jock Kinneir Margaret Calvert
Foundry	URW++
Sample

A road sign written mainly in Transport Heavy; the white on blue text is Transport Medium.

Transport is a sans serif typeface designed for road signs in the United Kingdom. It was created between 1957 and 1963 by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert ^[1] as part of their work as designers for the Department of Transport's Anderson, and Worboys committees. Before its introduction, British road signs used the capitals-only 'Llewelyn-Smith alphabet' introduced following the Maybury Report of 1933 and revised in 1955-7. Older signs, known as fingerposts, tended to use a variety of sans serif alphabets as supplied by their manufacturers. For the kinds of roads on which either of these alphabets was likely to be seen, legibility was not a pressing issue, but the planning and building of Britain's first motorway in the 1950s was a catalyst for change.

The Department of Transport appointed an Advisory Committee on Traffic Signs for Motorways under the Chairmanship of Sir Colin Anderson in 1957 and Jock Kinneir and his assistant Margaret Calvert were appointed as graphic designers to it. All aspects of signing were investigated and tested, initially on the Preston By-Pass (1958, now part of the M6 motorway), before their introduction on the (London-Yorkshire) M1 Motorway a year later. The Committee looked at examples from other European states as well as the USA but Kinneir and Calvert found them somewhat harsh and unsatisfactory. Instead, they developed a more rounded typeface with distinctive tails to 'a', 't', and 'l', and bar-less fractions, all of which helped legibility.

The Department, seeing the successful early results of this work then appointed another Committee, under the Chairmanship of Sir Walter Worboys and again using Kinneir & Calvert as designers, to look at Traffic Signs for All-Purpose Roads. Work for this also resulted in the introduction of the pictogram signs based on those recommended by the 1949 United Nations World Conference on Road and Motor Transport (often referred to as the Geneva Protocol.

Two forms of the typeface exist; Transport Medium and Transport Heavy. Both have the same basic form, but Transport Heavy is boldface, to allow easier readability for black letters on white backgrounds, such as those used on non-primary roads, while Transport Medium is lighter, and is used for white letters on dark backgrounds, such as the blue motorway signs or the green primary route signs.

Only a limited number of symbols are available in Transport, mainly those commonly used in road signs, such as primes, the pound sign and certain vulgar fractions such as ½ and ⅓ ^[2]. Various diacritics are also available, for use in languages other than English, such as Welsh and Irish.

Although developed in the United Kingdom, the typeface has been used in many other countries around the world. As well as the crown dependencies, British overseas territories and some limited residual usage in Commonwealth states or former nations of the British Empire, the typeface is also used in Hong Kong, the Republic of Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Greece and Spain. In countries where other alphabets (such as the Arabic alphabet) are used, Transport is often used for English transliterations ^[1].

[edit] See also

Rail Alphabet - The equivalent font on Britain's railways, also designed by Kinneir & Calvert.
Johnston Typeface - The London Underground font, designed by Edward Johnston.
Public signage typefaces
Road signs in the United Kingdom